Unsettlingly Familiar
by Sandra Evans
Summary: Vader stares into the unsettlingly familiar brown eyes of the Alderanian princess, and remembers the dark eyed beauty that he had loved eough to trade the freedom of the galaxy for, and his failed attempt to save her.


There is something unsettlingly familiar about this princess, Vader thinks as he stares at the slip of a girl before him. Her voice is strong and sure as lies pour from her young lips, her deep brown eyes staring unblinking into the helm that houses his ruined head.

How old could she be, Vader wonders briefly. Nineteen, twenty at most? His first thought is that Bail Organa is a fool for entrusting this child with matters of the resistance…but then he remembers that he had entered battle at the tender age of nine, that Padme had only been fourteen when the weight of Naboo had rested upon her shoulders. Children simply did not exist in this galaxy anymore.

"I am a member of the Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderan!" the girl insists again, her young voice hard as steel. Vader doesn't believe her for an instant.

The girl's small, thin shoulders are squared beneath yards of white fabric, her small jaw set and her hands hanging deceptively loose at her sides as his storm troopers grab her by her fragile arms. There is something about her stance, something about the strength in her eyes that is unsettlingly familiar.

Something that reminds him of a brown eyed beauty, fierce in the face of death in an area, chained to a pillar beside he and Obi-Wan Kenobi. She is not nearly as beautiful as that woman had been, to be sure, but something about her quiet strength, something about the way she carries herself, reminds him of the woman he had known and loved in another lifetime. A lifetime where he had been known as Anakin rather than Vader, a lifetime where the future had been bright rather than bleak.

This one has the same foolish political ideas as Padme had; Vader can see it in her eyes. She is a part of the rebel alliance, just as Padme had been one of the last to stand up to the Chancellor Palpatine. Like Padme, this girl honestly believes in freedom, in liberty. She does not realize how corrupt the leaders of the senate would become if left to their own devices, cannot understand that he had saved the galaxy rather than destroyed it.

Something in him snaps then, something that has nothing to do with his frustration over not finding the plans of the now-completed death star in the girl's ship. Looking into this girl's eyes suddenly and abruptly takes him back to a time when he had been known as 'The Chosen One,' when he had held a dark eyed beauty in his arms and had pressed his hands to a belly that was swollen with his child. Vader had become so focused on his empire that he had not allowed himself to dwell on thoughts of Padme for so long that thinking of her now was like pouring salt into an open wound.

Suddenly he cannot look at the girl anymore, can no longer stare into eyes so similar to his dead wife's that the scars on his heart thrum and pulse and hurt him as deeply as they had the day he woke with his body imprisoned in his mechanical shell and had realized that he had murdered the woman that he had loved deeply enough to trade the freedom of the galaxy to save.

And so he steps closer to the girl that reminds him so much of his dead wife, and his voice hardens with repressed emotion that he disguises as anger. "You are a part of the rebel alliance and a traitor," he accuses, and then glances away as quickly as is seemly, the look in those expressive dark eyes of hers so familiar that it would have taken his breath away had his suit not been equipped with a ventilator. "Take her away," he orders, and his storm troopers quickly do his bidding.

Long after the young princess is gone, however, Vader still finds himself trapped in memories, is still haunted by those unsettlingly familiar brown eyes. And he ponders, briefly, sadly, that if Padme had survived to give birth to his child, that if the infant had been a girl, she would have grown up to be someone very much like the Alderanian princess, Leia.


End file.
